Making The DRK/PLD Comp Viable/Meta - Think They're Gonna Do It?

[SyzzleSpark]

Just because a WAR pulls doesn't make them MT, you can pull to generate spike enmity then trade off and still be considered the OT. You seem to be under the impression that labelling the tanks as MT and OT means one always in tank stance and the other never tanking except adds. It doesn't.

This is not at all what I described.

If a WAR tanks the boss even only for a small portion of the fight...When the PLD or DRK swaps off the WAR, they inherit all of that aggro...

I specifically mentioned WAR tanking only a small portion of the fight i.e. the opener, and their co-tank inheriting their aggro upon taunting the boss, with no need for tank stance.

MT means the tank that you want taking the majority of the hits. PLD and DRK fit this role better because they have bonuses that they only get while being hit (sheltron, shield swipe, blood price, reprisal). Outside of vengeance, WAR does not gain anything from being hit. WAR also gets offensive use out of its CDs that DRK and PLD do not (wrath stacks), so it's better if the WAR can use CDs on demand rather than having to save them for strategic points like tank busters.

I fully understand that the act of pulling does not make you the MT. What I am saying is that having a defined MT/OT and entrenching oneself in that mentality is detrimental. There is no MT or OT in this game. All tanks have bonuses that they get from getting hit in some form or fashion. Yes, DRKs and PLDs like to tank for procs, but again, zerk Vengeance procs are also a DPS gain.

Also your thoughts about WAR losing out on Fell Cleave stacks by having to waste its defensive CDs on tank busters is flawed. See this A12S tank CD rotation provided by Bokchoy @ https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...g_with_a_dark/

First Punishing Heat: WAR (Holmgang)
Second Punishing Heat: DRK (Living Dead)
After Temporal Stasis #1: WAR (Holmgang)
After Temporal Stasis #2: DRK (Shadowskin + Dark Mind)
During Timegate: DRK (Shadow Wall + Dark Mind)
After Inception #1: WAR (Holmgang)
After Inception #2: DRK (Shadowskin + Dark Mind)
First Chastening Heat: DRK (Living Dead)
Second Chastening Heat: WAR (Everything)

Holmgang for pretty much everything. If you really didn't want to use Holmgang, Thrill+Conva and an Adlo would easily take a Punishing Heat, if you dropped very low for whatever reason, you have Equilibrium.

Ideally, there should be no "tank you want taking the majority of the hits". If you swap regularly and don't make the boss a single tank's responsibility for 90% of the fight, it increases raid DPS, and requires less healing.

Being the MT doesn't reduce your damage dealt, a good tank can tank any fight in this game without tank stance as long as the party is managing enmity properly. A good PLD and DRK in the MT slot does MORE damage than they could in the OT slot due to aforementioned procs.

And yes, I also know that being the "MT" doesn't reduce your damage dealt. But you mention managing enmity and part of that is having the WAR tank the boss at certain points of the fight to maintenance aggro. Yes you have Shadewalker, but if you have a MNK in the party a skilled DRK will still have to Power Slash a few times to babysit their enmity assuming Smokescreen is saved for a healer. Or you may not have a NIN at all. In this case, having the WAR take the boss for several combos aids enmity generation particularly if it is during their zerk window (during which they can offer additional DPS gains by popping Vengeance).

I love Reprisal procs and MP as much as the next DRK, but I also understand that I'm not the only player in a given group. A swap placed immediately after applying Reprisal for instance would mitigate damage for the WAR while he tanks the boss for a minute, for instance. If Blood Price is also on cooldown at this point, then I'm suffering very little loss. Blood Price is also rarely saved just for tanking, as any source of AoE damage is a potential MP proc that is literally free mana assuming you aren't going to be tanking for the following 40 seconds.

[aqskerorokero]

Give PLD a magic res debuff and welcome to the Holy Knight.

[Caduagm]

A simple solution to this is making delirium to also have blunt resistance down. Then it would be like ninjas with storm's eye

[Lyth]

I suspect that most people would be happy to see both str and int down as shared role actions for all tanks if WAR handed off control of the slashing debuff to melee dps.

Path, Reprisal, and Divine Veil all occupy the same niche. Path is the only one of the three which you can have 100% uptime on, but it costs you dps to use. Divine Veil is free and does not require a target, but has a long recast. Reprisal is free and has a shorter recast than Divine Veil, but requires you to be actively tanking, requires a fight with physical autos, and requires you to get a parry proc. There are advantages and disadvantages to each.

Personally, I feel that Veil’s effectiveness could be improved by changing it to %DR (similar to Testudo), shortening its recast, and removing the healing proc requirement, but there are plenty of situations in which it’s the only move that can mitigate a raid-wide attack, if there is no target present.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that both PLD and WAR have PvP analogs that fit this niche as well, in Testudo (party-wide %DR), and Thrill of War (party-wide max HP boost and regen, as sort of a party-wide Thrill of Battle). Either of these concepts could be used to rework the above trio of abilities in PvE.

The bigger problem with Path is that it ties up one of WAR’s three combos. At the moment, DRK and PLD are forced to choose between enmity and dps. WAR does not. But if you simply rework Butcher’s Block so that it does less damage than Eye, WAR just becomes a one-combo dps rotation. This isn’t terribly interesting.

One solution is to move WAR’s Path debuff off of their combo system, onto a cooldown with a recast like Thrill of War. Then, move Maim’s effect to the end of the third combo, and now you have an obligatory two-combo rotation (Path/Eye or Path/BB) which forces you to choose intelligently between maintaining your enmity lead and pushing your dps, without creating controversy with your co-tank in the process.

With regards to Raw Intuition, it’s worth noting that most of the differences between WAR’s defensive kit and the other two tanks arises from the fact that it doesn’t have access to Rampart. In ARR, your Rampart equivalent existed somewhere between Inner Beast and Thrill of Battle. Vengeance and Holmgang also were tuned to have much shorter recasts than the equivalents on the other two tanks in order to make up for WAR’s relative weakness in the 90s recast range. This made them very good dedicated OTs, as you could alternate between jumping in and blowing most of your defensives on a tankbuster, or by using Holmgang instead.

The problem in ARR was that Inner Beast was used to mitigate everything. In HW, Fell Cleave disincentivized Inner Beast usage, and you got Raw Intuition as a sort of Rampart-lite. But the devs have already confirmed that Rampart will be a shared tank action in Stormsblood. So not only will most of these skills need to be rebalanced, but I’m wondering if all these additional Rampart-like substitutes (Inner Beast, Thrill of Battle, Raw Intuition) that WAR has been collecting over the expansions will retain their present form.

Granted, if PLD’s blocks work on magic damage in the expansion, I could see IB and Sheltron occupying a similar niche. But I think the cost and recast would need to be adjusted accordingly to balance them out.

[Makeda]

The MT/OT meta is toxic because it is inflexible and precludes the use of strategies that often turn out to be DPS, tanking, and healing efficient. It also limits us on an individual basis.

Very few fights in this game, at least currently, are not movement heavy for both tanks, and adds spawn at varying points and sometimes simultaneously, thus both tanks "tank the adds."

Its also a very poor decision to have 1 tank hold the boss for the entire fight, especially if the fight doesn\\'t have many adds or the adds to not spawn while the boss is on the field.

Many fights have "taunt swap" mechanics but yet a lot of skilled groups elect to insert their own un-forced tank swaps at predetermined points because it maximize tank and healer DPS, healing efficiency, and mitigation

I haven\\'t played many MMOs outside of XIV, but in my opinion, XIV\\'s way sounds much more intelligent. It may be that other MMOs have their own strategic mechanics that require a different skillset and mentality and force you into that MT/OT mindset, but that simply isn\\'t how it works (optimally) in this game.

The MT/OTconcept has been dead in other MMOs for about 6-7 years now. It died somewhere between the Wrath / Cataclysm expansion lull in WoW. In Wrath we were realizing tank swaps very often but the community was still trying to see it as MT/OT but by Cata we got over it, and near as I know no MMO since 2010-2011 has done the MT/OT thing.

As I noted I have not raid tanked here, so when I see people keep using the MT/OT lingo I just started presuming this MMO had gone back in time on this... certainly in all the primal fights I see, you end up with a MT/OT if you even use both as tanks. Think of Leviathan which popped for me in queue an absurd number of times these paat few days... One tank gets the head, the other tanks runs around getting everything else plus tail.
- that is a fight designed by a game deaigner in the late 1990s...

For a recent oldschhool example; the scorpion boss in the Nighthold raid in WoW's curent expac... One tank takes the scorpion and all ahe does is move from side to side every so often to break a chain that if not broken causes her to take near double damage. There are from a dozen to potentially hundreds of adds - anytime a player fails to hide behind a piller they get knocked into a wall of miniscorpions. If all players hide, then a few scorpions still come. These can end up all over the map and the OT has to keep finding them and grouping them up for DPS. The OT role on this fight takes a lot of player skill.
- but it is out of step with modern design... and many tanks are lost when they see it the first time. For the first few months it was out chat between tanks was always (Q:when do we swap? A: I dunno, lets wipe until we find it.)

I agree the MT/OT thing is bad design. It creates a bad social dynamic between your tanks even in an MMO where the design works for it.

So... if you say it is NOT the design here, why do I keep seeing it mentioned, even in this thread?

Idk, at least WAR got some love this expansion. Does no one remember early coil days of only running PLD for both tank slots?

Yep. I was playing WAR when 2.0 hit and fron the moment I did the very first dungeon people were telling me to stop trolling the DF queue with a bad class and to switch... Even though I was doing just fine. When we did do well, they would retort that it was just lowbie leveling content so even the conjurer could have tanked... but that I would be wasting my FCs tome if I didn't change jobs then while it was early.

I had the thread of a WAR player who was being called a liar for tanking coil bookmarked, and I used to link his posts to people daily when told to stop hurting their game bringing the "fake tank"...

I used to tank with Bruiser in City of Villains, so I knew the concept before it showed up as the WAR here.

[SyzzleSpark]

why do I keep seeing it mentioned, even in this thread?

Because sadly, a lot of the playerbase has not caught up with the times in that respect. Its an outmoded idea that damages their performance but its simply easier and requires less effort to just stuff one tank into the MT box and stuff the other into the OT box and call it a day, rather than having to coordinate all the stuff I described. Laziness, I guess, would be the 1-word answer to that question.

Mario and Luigi.

[Lyth]

I would encourage you to try out raiding in this game (or even do a few HW trials) in this game and see for yourself. Knowledge of other MMOs is a poor substitute for actually playing this game yourself.

Encounters in this game tend to be highly scripted. Majestic Tank and Ordinary Tank are just labels that people use for convenience, so that you know which are your lines in the script.

You could simply call them 1P and 2P if you like. Or Mario and Luigi.